# Gaurav Keswani > Staff Software Engineer at Shopify Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/gauravkeswani I'm currently working as a Staff Software Engineer at Shopify. Before Shopify, I spent 4 years at Yelp where I was the Tech Lead for the Notifications Platform team. In my time there, I led the effort to build an intelligent messaging platform (Mercury) for product, marketing and engineering teams to be able to communicate with Yelp users via push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, emails and web pushes. I've previously completed my Masters in Computer Science from Cornell University where I was employed as a Teaching Assistant for the graduate level 'Database Systems' course (CS 5321) in the Spring of 2016. In my time at Cornell, I spent the summer interning at a cloud data warehousing startup called Snowflake Computing. Before moving to the United States, I got a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Information Technology from the University of Mumbai. After completing my undergraduate program, I spent a year working as a Technology Analyst in the Risk and Finance Technology department of JP Morgan Chase where my work primarily involved backend development of an object-oriented, scalable and secure framework for sourcing market data from external vendors like Bloomberg, Reuters, and Bank of America. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Shopify Jan 2020 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area • Contributed to the development of store switcher functionality that enables multi-store Shopify Plus merchants to navigate between their stores more easily. • Implemented faceted search (filtering) for online stores hosted on Shopify. • Designed the Branding API, which allows merchants to manage their brand assets, customize their checkout, and connect to sales channels such as the Online Store or any 1P/3P apps. • Led the development of Shopify Alerts, a system that provides merchants with crucial information about their store so they can take action on important events immediately. • Worked on laying down the initial groundwork to enable bulk import and export of data from the Shopify platform using SQLite. • Led the redesign of the Home page by personalizing the content based on the current state of the shop's lifecycle. • Led the development for Test Drive to give enterprise merchants the opportunity to test systems and train staff before new features rollout to their stores. • Implemented Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to streamline user access management and enable bulk user management through groups. • Led the development for Shopify's identity verification platform (by integrating with Stripe Identity & Alloy) where users have to confirm their identity by taking a selfie with a valid photo ID. • Led the development of business entities to allow merchants to create, manage and sell from multiple business entities, both in-person and online, through a single store with Shopify Payments. ### Angel Investor @ Self Employed Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States • Investing in technology companies that are changing the world. • Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, Stripe, Anduril, Faire, Epic Games, Notion, Copilot Money, AngelList, Airtable, World Coin, Mercury, Boom Supersonic, Siren Biotech, Ashby, Cerebras Systems, Ramp, Scale AI, Flexport, Eleven Labs, Varda Space Industries ### Tech Lead (Notifications Platform) @ Yelp Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Leading the effort to build an intelligent messaging platform (Mercury) for product, marketing and engineering teams to be able to communicate with Yelp users via push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, emails and web pushes. At its most fundamental level, Mercury is a message routing service. It sits between Yelp applications and third party providers, managing the complexities of interacting with these providers, while presenting a simple interface to applications across multiple notification channels. It also has an intelligence component built into it that aims to maximize the incremental LTV of Yelp users. It does this by monitoring all offline communication from Yelp to the user and only sending messages that protect the user experience while also maximizing value for Yelp. ### Senior Software Engineer (Notifications Platform) @ Yelp Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area • Built a machine learning based intelligence component in Mercury that maximizes the incremental LTV of Yelp users by monitoring all offline communication and only sending messages that protect the user experience while also maximizing value for Yelp. • Added support for web push notifications (on desktop and mobile site) as a new channel in Mercury to reduce our reliance on Google for web traffic and enable re-engagement of users that use Yelp's web properties. • Developed a serverless solution to sync third-party provider data to Yelp’s data lake while also evaluating other use cases for bringing serverless technology to the group. ### Software Engineer - Backend & Machine Learning (Notifications Platform) @ Yelp Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Founding engineer on the team that designed and developed a message routing service (Mercury) that sits between Yelp services and third-party providers (like Twilio & Sendgrid). Mercury manages the complexities of interacting with external providers while presenting a standard API to internal applications across multiple messaging channels. ### Software Engineer - Backend (Growth Notifications) @ Yelp Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area • Developed a system that triggers location-aware notifications to send timely, personal and contextual push notifications to users when they are at a business or are traveling as part of a larger retention and engagement strategy. • Ran A/B tests to develop and improve other features that led to higher user activity and improved retention metrics. • Led a project to measure uninstall and unsubscribe rates for push notifications. This allowed product managers to make informed decisions while making trade offs between the positive and negative effects of push notifications. ### Software Engineering Intern - Backend (Growth Acquisition) @ Yelp Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area Worked on a referral/incentive-based project to boost user acquisition. The feature allowed users to invite others via a promo code and be rewarded for it if the invited user downloaded the mobile app and made their first transaction. ### Software Engineer @ Snowflake Computing Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Mateo, California • Worked on the Global Services team to develop the next generation elastic data warehouse for the cloud • Prototyped a thread profiler and data pipeline (with an AVRO schema) to monitor system activity and perform workload analysis in Looker • Implemented a caching scheme for AWS STS tokens to reduce the time taken for concurrent PUT/GET queries and avoid throttling by Amazon ### Graduate Teaching and Research Assistant @ Cornell University Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Ithaca, New York Area • Worked as a Teaching Assistant for the graduate level Database Systems course • Contributed to maintain a high level of teaching and provided personal academic support to students ### Software Engineer @ J.P. Morgan Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Mumbai Area, India • Developed a scalable and object oriented framework for sourcing market data from vendors like Bloomberg, Reuters, and IDC • Mitigated risk by developing fair value adjustment algorithms for the Chief Investment Office (CIO) and Securitized Product Group (SPG) • Was awarded for exceptional work in the first year of employment in the Fixed Income Department ## Education ### Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) in Computer Science Cornell University ### Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Information Technology University of Mumbai ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/gauravkeswani - GitHub: https://github.com/gkeswani92 - Portfolio: https://dev.to/gaurav_keswani --- Source: https://flows.cv/gauravkeswani JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/gauravkeswani/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12